McDSP engineering sought to leverage the high end analog components and most aggressive saturation circuit in the APB hardware to create a compressor with attitude. If you are looking for the rooster in the hen house of dynamic range processors, the ChickenHead is it.
The ChickenHead Compressor is an aggressive dynamic range processor, and is well suited for crushing tracks into submission. Dynamics controls include compression ratio, attack and release times, and a special ‘Sauce’ feature. The ChickenHead utilizes the most aggressive of the three custom saturations circuits available, imparting some serious attitude on to any track.
An important aspect of any APB plug-in is that the plug-in is primarily a controller. The APB plug-in takes the input audio signal, combines it with a control signal, and sends both along a Thunderbolt connection to an APB unit for processing. The control signal sets up the analog components to do the selected algorithm with all the parameter values, and the audio signal is converted to the analog domain. The analog version of the audio signal is processed in the analog domain, and then converted back to the digital domain.
By operating the APB hardware from an APB plug-in in this way, all user controllable parameters are recallable and can be saved as presets. Furthermore, because the control signal is married to the input audio signal, parameters can be updating during playback with sample accurate automation.